Long before I ran a single server in my house, my first attempt at getting out was a path of reduction. I didn't have a plan so much as a growing list of things I'd stopped doing. I got careful about which services I signed up for, and started asking whether I actually needed an account before I created one. I switched from Chrome to Firefox, and from Google search to DuckDuckGo. I turned off the location timeline in Google Maps. And I started giving every service its own email alias, a unique address that forwarded to my real inbox, so that if junk mail ever started showing up at the address I'd given one particular company, I'd know exactly which company had passed it along.
Some of that helped, and some of it, as I admitted back in Article 3, was closer to cosmetic. Turning off the Maps timeline switched off the dashboard more than it switched off the collection. The email aliases, on the other hand, did exactly what I wanted them to do, and they still do. It was years after all of that before I started hosting my own services, running software on hardware in my own house so that I could decide for myself what data existed about me and where it lived.
I'm telling you the order those things happened in on purpose. For seven articles, this series has been about the problem: what gets collected, by whom, and how all of it gets called "consent." Act I is finished. This is the point where the question changes from "what is happening to me" to "what, if anything, should I do about it," and honestly, there are no wrong answers.
The Careful Path
Most of the people I work with spend their days thinking about how systems get compromised. You might expect them all to have server racks in their basements. Most of them don't. What most of them do instead looks a lot like where I started.
They're careful. They think about a service before they register for it, and they ask what it actually needs from them in return. They keep "throwaway" email accounts for the simple, inconsequential sign-ups, the store loyalty program or the one-time download, so their real address stays out of places it doesn't need to be. Many of them run a privacy-focused alternative to the version of Android that came on their phone. None of that required a weekend project. It required a habit, and the habit mostly consists of pausing for a few seconds before clicking the button Article 7 spent sixteen minutes explaining.
It's worth being clear about what this path does and doesn't do. It shrinks how much of yourself you hand over. It doesn't change who holds the parts you still hand over, and for the services you keep using, the arrangement underneath is the same one this series has been describing. That's a real limit, but it isn't a reason to dismiss the approach. Handing over less is a meaningful improvement, and for a lot of people it's the right place to stop.
The careful path isn't the beginner's version. It's valid and, for most people, it's the destination.
The Build-It-Yourself Path
The other way out is the one I eventually took: replacing commercial services with ones you run yourself, on hardware you own, so the question of where your data lives has an answer you can actually go and check. It's the most complete answer to the problems in Act I that I know of, because it removes the middleman from the arrangement instead of negotiating better terms with them.
I also truly believe that what I'm doing is something most people wouldn't want to do, and I don't say that to sound modest. If you aren't willing to treat self-hosting as a hobby, things will be broken often. There's no support line to call when something that worked yesterday doesn't work today, because the support line is you. The time goes somewhere, and for me it goes into evenings and weekends I happen to enjoy spending that way. If you wouldn't enjoy it, it's a chore with a steep learning curve and no end date.
Even I have limits. I don't host my own email. Running a mail server well, one that doesn't lose messages and doesn't get your mail flagged as spam by everyone else's, was a step too far for me. I use Proton Mail instead, which is about as private and secure as I can get without doing it myself. I mention that because it says something about how this actually works in practice, even at the far end: the line gets drawn by judgment about what's worth your time, not by some kind of purity test.
The Third Option Nobody Names
The title of this article says there are two ways out. There's a third option that isn't a way out at all, and it's just as valid: you can read everything in this series, weigh it, and decide to keep using the products exactly as you do now.
I said in the very first article that if you decided the convenience was worth the cost, I'd consider that a completely legitimate conclusion. I meant it then and I mean it now. This whole series, for me, has been about one thing. I want you to know what compromises you're accepting with these services, in real terms: the location history, the default settings, the data brokers, the agreements designed to be clicked past. Not in the vague "big companies do shady stuff" way that everyone already half-believes and nobody acts on.
If you look at all of that clearly and decide Google Maps is worth it, that's a decision. It's a different thing from the default you inherited without ever looking at it, even if nothing on your phone changes.
- Staying putAsks nothing new of you. Changes your awareness of the arrangement, not the arrangement itself.
- The careful path: costNew habits, a few afternoons of settings changes, and possibly a paid service or two where you used to rely on free ones.
- The careful path: effectShrinks how much you hand over. Doesn't change who holds what you still hand over.
- Building it yourself: costHardware, electricity, ongoing hobby-level time, and a tolerance for things breaking with nobody to call.
- Building it yourself: effectMoves your data onto hardware you control. Still leaves services that aren't practical to run yourself, like email.
- What they shareAll three are legitimate, as long as they're chosen with the tradeoffs understood rather than inherited by default.
A Change of Plans
When I started this series, I wrote in the first article that it would eventually fork into two tracks: one for people who wanted practical, no-technical-skills-required steps, and one for people who wanted to follow the full journey into self-hosting and open-source software. That's not what's going to happen here, and I'd rather tell you that now than leave a promise from Article 1 sitting there unkept.
The reason is everything I just said about the two paths. Most people reading this don't want a home lab, and I'd be doing them a disservice by splitting the back half of the series between a path they'll take and one they'll skim past. The remaining four articles will follow the careful path, written for someone with no technical background and no interest in acquiring one.
The self-hosting side of the story hasn't gone anywhere. It's just not part of this series. I may write about it separately down the road, for the readers who want to go further, but I'm not going to put a date on that, and I'd rather under-promise here than repeat the same mistake twice.
Where This Series Goes From Here
The next four articles are practical, in roughly the order I'd recommend tackling them: the changes that cost you an afternoon and nothing else first, then the harder moves that involve something you've relied on for years. They'll keep publishing on roughly the same schedule Act I did.
- 09 · The Afternoon That Changes EverythingQuick wins: your browser, your search engine, and the worst of the default settings. A few hours, no technical skill required.
- 10 · Your Email Is Being ReadMoving away from Gmail, written for someone who's had the same address for fifteen years and is nervous about switching.
- 11 · The Cloud Doesn't Have to Be Someone Else's ComputerConsumer-friendly alternatives for your files and photos, for people who need the convenience but want to stop feeding the machine.
- 12 · Your Phone Is the Hardest PartAndroid and iPhone, neither of them clean, and practical harm reduction for the device that knows the most about you.
In the next article, I'm going to start where I started: the browser, the search engine, and the settings most people have never opened. This time with the benefit of hindsight, including an honest account of which of my own early changes did real work and which ones mostly made me feel better.